Hearthmist Shaders

Hearthmist Shaders is a bright, cinematic shader pack focused on warm village lighting, atmospheric weather, expressive water, and natural vegetation movement without ray tracing.

Highlights

• Soft dynamic sun and moon shadows
• Golden sunsets and adjustable cool moonlight
• Atmospheric lowland, dawn, rain, underwater, lava, and powder-snow fog
• Animated grass, flowers, crops, and tree leaves with anchored roots and stronger wind during rain
• Water ripples, sky reflections, depth-based transparency, and sun highlights
• Soft bloom, screen-space sun rays, contact shading, filmic color grading, and optional grain
• Warm torch light and visible illumination from light-emitting items held by the player
• English and Russian shader settings

Presets

• Low: no dynamic shadows; lightweight color, fog, water ripples, and handheld light
• Balanced: 1024 shadow map, 64-block shadow distance, bloom, contact shading, reflections, and vegetation animation
• Cinematic: 2048 shadow map, 96-block shadow distance, sun rays, stronger atmosphere, and the full visual feature set

Every major effect can be adjusted independently. Wind speed and the movement strength of grass, flowers, and leaves have separate controls.

Compatibility

• Minecraft Java Edition 1.17 and newer
• Designed for Iris and OptiFine
• GLSL 330 compatibility / OpenGL 3.3 or newer
• Tested live with OptiFine 1.21.11 HD U J9 pre4 on an NVIDIA RTX 4060

Installation

Place the ZIP file in .minecraft/shaderpacks without extracting it, then select Hearthmist Shaders in the Iris or OptiFine shader menu.

Technical notes

The pack uses sky-color water reflections rather than full screen-space scene reflections. Sun rays are screen-space and appear while the sun is visible in the frame. It does not include path tracing, volumetric clouds, Distant Horizons integration, or Vivecraft-specific support.

The release was validated by compiling and linking 340 shader-program combinations and by automated OpenGL render checks for day, sunset, night, rain, underwater rendering, other dimensions, vegetation deformation, status effects, and OptiFine fallback paths.